Students from the Palestine encampment in Newcastle occupy the Armstrong building
The Newcastle university student encampment is continuing, despite the most intense police brutality on Wednesday.
The police “shoved, groped, kicked, elbowed, strangled, punched, hit with batons, and threw to the ground” students, according to a statement by students involved in the encampment.
This was after activists decided to escalate on Wednesday and occupy a university building after management refused to meet any of the camp’s demands. And management has been stringing students along with informal meetings and had cut off electricity and toilet facilities to those in the encampment.
A campaigner involved in the encampment told Socialist Worker, “We started with around 50 people occupying the university building. Protesters got inside and blockaded all the doors, renaming it Al Shifa Hall.
“While this was happening, police from Durham up to the border of Scotland were mobilised.”
The activist said, “We started to see more vans. And then riot police with batons in their hands arrived. We realised the situation was getting bad. The counter-terrorism police arrived and tried to storm the occupation.
“It made us furious that management sanctioned the counter-terrorism police against students. It reached the point where there was a police line blocking the building. The police stopped all supplies getting to those inside.
Another local activist who was there said, “The police stopped medical attention getting through. A woman had a seizure and the cops prevented a doctor from arriving.”
The activist from encampment said, “So we decided to try and break the police lines and to get those in the building out. The administration had locked them inside by this stage. It went up to around 400 people trying to break through the police line.
“The police became a lot more violent. A riot cop punched me in the face. I stumbled into the crowd, but then fixed up my kafir and then went back to the front lines.”
They added, “We were pushing and pushing. And at another point, a cop pulled down my kafir and said, ‘I’ve fucking got you now’ and started to strangle me with it.
“The police were beating us badly. Police cracked open heads, cracked people’s knees, punctured lungs, cracked ribs and set dogs on protesters.”
The encampment activist said that after a few hours “the police let those locked inside out”. “We then rallied together and marched down the road to Tyne bridge,” they said. “We picked up construction barriers, creating a blockade and completely shutting down the bridge.”
After blocking the bridge, activists then “went to the police stations where the police had taken people to, protesting outside of them”. “Eventually all four people who the police arrested were released,” the activist said.
“The cops tried to arrest a lot more but we fought back whenever they did. The police brutalised us. It was one of the most brutal protests I’ve seen in my political life.”
The activist said that the mood in the encampment was one of defiance. “People are focusing on what we can do next. We aren’t letting police brutality get to us,” they said.
“Everyone has a militant mood. We are thinking about how we can escalate, how we can stay over the summer, what we can do next,” they said.
“It has shown people the true nature of university management—how they called counter terrorism police on their own students.”
The lesson to learn, they argued, was that “management aren’t our friends, the police aren’t our friends”. “They are our enemies,” they said. “They protect property and the rich. We will keep fighting and escalating.”
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